Any non-fiction suggestions out there?

I'm reading the collected writing of Lesley Blanch - Far To Go And Many To Love. Enjoying it much which is just as well as I'm interviewing the editor/author at a literary festival in 2 weeks!!

I randomly bought a copy of The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk in a second-hand shop recently, and it's possibly the best work of popular history I've ever read. It's about the rivalry between Britain and Russia for influence in Central Asia in the 19th Century and it's utterly gripping.

I've just read The Boy in the Water by Tom Gregory. Wrote by the person who swam the English Channel aged 11yrs. Fascinating.

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.
About the son of Christopher Columbus, who accompanied his father on his last voyage and then travelled Europe with the aim of collecting all the books and prints he could to create a great library. Fascinating.

Random Family is excellent. Gang Leader for a Day sounds like one for me to look up, thank you.

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx (Adrian Nicole LeBlanc) - An account of a poverty stricken family living in the Bronx over the span of about 10 years.

Infidel (Ayaan Hirst Ali) - The autobiography of a a Somali-Dutch activist and politician, who fled to Holland as a political asylee

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets (Sudhir Venkatesh) - A sociology student infilitrates a Chicago gang and recounts their day-to-day life.

Join Me (Danny Wallace) - Danny Wallace takes out a newspaper ad asking people to 'Join him' by sending a passport photo of themselves. Things snowball from there.

Auschwitz: The Nazis & the 'Final Solution' (Laurence Rees)

Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia (Jean Sasson) - The biography of a princess in the royal house of Saudi Arabia.

To the Edge of the Sky (Anhua Gao) - The story of a woman who lived in communist China under Chairman Mao who eventually escapes and makes a new life in Britain.

Black Flags - the rise of ISIS is a very good account of the rise of ISIS - focusing on how Zarqawi went from rebel tattooed teenager to fundamentalist leader of ISIS.

I agree that the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a wonderful book. Though it also made me Very angry (at the injustice, not the writing)

Dreamland: the true tale of America’s opiate epidemic is also a terrifying - I didn’t realise what a huge problem prescription painkillers in the US was (and still is).

Anything by Atul Gawande, but especially Being Mortal and Complications
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life by Haider Warraich
(bit of a theme going on there!)

If you have any interest in parenting and education then:
^Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality" by Jane Asher
All Joy and No Fun by Jenifer Senior
Taming the Tiger Parent by Tanith Carey
Cleverlands by Lucy Crehan

Other ones which come to mind
Thank You for Being Late by Thomas L. Friedman
Cure by Jo Marchant
Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being Alice Roberts
Ben Goldacre is good too.

An old one which I still love is Bill Bryson "A short history of nearly everything". I also love "Shakespeare" by him.
If you like biographies, Claire Tomalin wrote a wonderful one on Samuel Pepys. I read it for a book group and wasn't expecting to enjoy it as much as I did. I've bought more biographies by her now.
I read quite a lot of non fiction but I'm a natural history geek so most of it is that genre. I like David Attenboroughs "Life Stories", "Trilobite" by Richard Fortey, "King Soloman's ring" by Konrad Lorenz, "The Song of the Dodo" by David Quammen etc etc. which isn't everyone's idea of a fun reading list!

Heads up for The Salt Path by Raynor Winn on Kindle Daily Deal today 99p. This has been on my wishlist for a while and the waiting list at the library was long. It's about a couple who lose their home to massive debts following a business collapse, and also discover the husband is seriously ill. They have nothing to lose and decide to walk the south west coast path whilst they still can.

I love Robert Macfarlane's books. They are wonderful love letters to our natural world. I've also really enjoyed Meadowland and The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel.

I've recently enjoyed Educated by Tara Westover and In The Days of Rain by Rebecca Stott. The latter is about her upbringing within the Exclusive Brethren cult (as she described it).

I've just abandoned The Secret Barrister. Having worked for many years in law (not any more, thankfully), I was finding it all a bit stressy, and that's not what I want from reading.

I have got 'if this is a woman' waiting to be read but need to find the right time to read it. Nothing to envy and first they killed my father/gulag are also similarly traumatic reads but worth it.
No regrets - Edith piaf
Mary beard - women and power
Names for the sea - about living in iceland
Romanovs
Gulp- about journey of food through our digestive system.
Reaching down the rabbit hole - insight into a neurologists everyday life
Any winners of the wellcome trust

On a topical note, I'm about 6 chapters into Woodward's "Fear" on Trump's presidency. Very interesting (but reportage rather than analysis, so I'm finding some of the gaps in the narrative, and jumps from one incident to the next without any attempt to place it in a framing explanation a little bit irritating).

Oops - sorry about that - I did mean Being Mortal, which I liked better than Do No Harm (though latter was still well worth reading), but was clearly thinking about both when I posted!

Ones I'm looking forward to: Eve was shamed follow-up to the excellent Eve was framed by Helena Kennedy; the new biography of Robert Graves; Rage Becomes Her Soraya Chemaly; I am Dynamite biography of Nietzsche; Born to be posthumous biography of the marvellous illustrator Edward Gorey; Affluence without abundance: the disappearing world of the bushmen by James Suzman.

Cross-section of ones I've enjoyed: Emma Smith's account of working on the canals during WW2 Maidens' Trip, Clair Wills Lovers and Strangers about the lives of immigrants in Britain after WW2 ; Jean Lucey Pratt's diary; Philip Hoare England's Lost Eden about Victorian communes/utopian groups; anything written by Eula Biss; Annie Ernaux The Years'; Hermione Lee's brilliant biography of Virginia Woolf; Caroline Moorhead's books about women in France during WW2; Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation about her bookshop and her time publishing writers like James Joyce and hanging out in 1920s Paris; Catherine Merridale Lenin on the train'; Anne Applebaum Iron Curtain'; Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands'; Norman Mailer The Executioner's Song, Lara Feigel The Bitter Taste of Victory, James Baldwin's essays and I am not your negro; Akala's Natives and Afua Hirsch's Brit(ish)

Robert mcFarlane's books about landscape and language - The Old Ways & etc. so beautifully written and fascinating.

An older book which is a favourite of mine, The Emperor of Scent. It's an enthralling book about perfume, physics and the resistance of establishment science to new ideas. By Chandler Burr. And Luca Turin's perfume reviews if you're interested in scent.

The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Letters Between Six Sisters

'The Whisperers- Private Life In Stalin's Russia', by Orlando Figes is superb.

I also found another memoir, Lab Girl by Hope Jahren, fascinating, even though I don't read very many sciencey books.

Sadik,

Being Mortal is by Atul Gawande
Do No Harm is by Henry Marsh
I have heard bits of both on the radio and bought both of them and intend to read them properly. They have clearly similar subject matter.

Emperor of All Maladies is about cancer and is sometimes not easy reading but it does have a very strong narrative and I found it really compelling.

Another tough, tough read but brilliant is Sarah Helm, If This is a Woman, about Ravensbruck, a concentration camp for women. It's also very long.

Another Day in the Death of America is also very good.

A little light relief at least by comparison with the others: Once Upon a Time in the East: Growing Up in China by Xiaolu Guo is a literary memoir - I've read a few memoirs about China but this is one I liked better than some of the well-known ones like Wild Swans. The author's parents were of the generation caught up in the Cultural Revolution and she was born in 1973 so writes about growing up in post-Mao China of the 1980s and 1990s. She has also written several novels in English and now lives in London - before that she was a film maker. Some of her experiences must have been quite hard, but she's never self-pitying and she realises that she's actually very lucky compared to other Chinese women (unlike the authors of other more famous memoirs of China that have been very succesful in the West).

Educated by Tara west over.

Another bloody day in the America by Gary younge

Throw away unopened by viv albertine

My life in houses by Margaret Forster.
Broken and betrayed by Jayne senior.

All bloody brilliant!

If you want a piece of non-fiction that is just massively entertaining, read Ma'am Darling by Craig Brown. It's a biography of Princess Margaret, and I've probably recommended it several times already. It's hilarious and completely original.

Dopeland - by Beth Macy
Very detailed look about how opioid addiction has spread through large swathes of America, and the difficulties and cost of treatment, and AA's failure to accept that medical assisted treatment is a feasible and necessary option for many individuals